AUDIO

2.5 really

Audio is an obscure progressive rock band formed in 1981 in Padua - Italy. Along the early years of their career they never manage to come with a studio album, the first album, a live one was released only in 1993 by well known record label Mellow Records , entitled simply Audio. This CD contains live parts from diffrent concerts in Italy from 1981, 1982 and 1984. Now about the music, is something between prog pop and symphonic prog not far from traditional italian atmosphere with some good instrumental passages, specially the instrumetal tracks like, of cours entitled Srumentale. But as a whole the album is almost mediocre, and only because, at least live the voice of Mario Casellato in places is tottaly out of place. These live recordings are not bad, but doesn't fully offers to the listner the true potential of the band. The sound is muddy , in some parts , very bad, only the drumer on entire CD is worth mentioning. So an almost forgetable release, if this pieces were made as a studio album, then were somthing elese, but in this case , the best I can give is 2-2.5 , some parts are ok, but more then half is mediocre.

Audio are an interesting if obscure band that feature huge instrumental breaks in their music. They love to use sax to enhance the sound and it is played very well. The organ is a feature along with some clear male vocals sung in Italian. With this in mind the album should be a real achievement, however the production is quite bad, bordering on awful, the mixing is atrocious and therefore the instruments are not given the enhanced treatment for true enjoyment. These are live recordings but the dropouts in sound are noticeable and detract from the experience. No doubt the band can play but they need to get a decent producer and sound mixer system.

Highlights include Visione, featuring excellent sax and Casellato's vocals. Sordomuta has divine organ with heavy guitars with fast paced vocals. The sax is sensational on this and blazes away brilliantly, from a quick pace to a slow crawl. Strumentale is a musical experience with jangly guitar and great synth sounds. Spazi has some awesome sax blasts with weird echoed emotive vocals. UF-one is 9 minutes of jamming with some vocals thrown in; the guitars on this are wonderful. Fermati se puoi is a lengthy session with some delightful flute. Stanza chiusa features gulls and waves crashing on a beach with an ambient sax moaning out a sonnet of loss with darkened textures.

So those are the highlights and it is very good music in need of a decent record producer. 3 stars in this case.

From the beautiful city of Padua in North-Eastern Italy comes this long forgotten band, formed in 1981.Audio suffered from numerous line-up changes throughout their long career,five of the nine founding members though , singer Mario Casellato, guitarists Gabriele Zarzi and Alberto Lazzarin, bassist Massimo Durante and sax/flute player Roberto Milesi, carried the torch almost during the whole career of the act.However Audio did not come up with an official album during their heydays and only in 1993 a Mellow Records self-titled CD saw the light, containing recordings from Audio's live gigs between 1981 and 1984.

Not a good thing to almost immediately notice that the production and sound of these rare recordings is below average.Muddy, with some instruments like the bass almost buried, and pretty annoying in general.The music holds some interest, especially on the later tracks, as the opening ones are in a Melodic Rock vein with occasional bursts into Horn Rock, Soul, Jazz and Blues with some of the guitar and sax work being often captivating, but overall the performance and inspiration are less than even mediocre.By the middle of this release the tracks breathe some nice air.''Sogni di vetro'', ''Spazi'' and ''UF-one'' sound like a mix of Jazz-Rock, light Symphonic and Canterbury Prog with again saxes on the forefront, good background synths, interesting guitars and even some delicate flutes, not particularly exciting but definitely on the right side.Still the production is a problem and the vocals are questionable, depending on the listener whether he likes them or not.The longest composition, the 10-min. ''Fermati se puoi'' finally sees the band in full form.A full-prog arrangement with a strong Canterbury flavor, eventually the band offers tons of great interplays between guitars, saxes and flutes with nice background synths and memorable breaks, somewhere between HATFIELD AND THE NORTH, NATIONAL HEALTH and HAPPY THE MAN.''Stanza chiusa'' is quite a different beast, the most energetic yet melodic composition by far, much based on electric guitars and vocals but with some good inspiration throughout, not far from ATON'S style.The closing short cut ''A sweet sad song'', the only English-sung track of the album, is just an acoustic ballad with supporting saxes, not of any interest.

Two great compositions along with plenty of incohesive material does not complete a trully recommended release.However the obscurity surrounding the band along with the interesting parts of the album make ''Audio'' as good collector's item.For fans of varied Italian Soft Prog with occasional explosions of adventurous music.